The Eden Express (15 page)

I began to wonder if I was hurting the trees and found myself apologizing. Each tree began to take on personality. I began to wonder if any of them liked me. I became completely absorbed in looking at each tree and began to notice that they were ever so slightly luminescent, shining with a soft inner light that played around the branches.

 

I’ve lost patience. I’ve lost my brakes. I’m willing to make sense as soon as the rest of the world does. There were lots of things I just plain wasn’t going to put up with any more. A lot of what I decided to chuck was my old way of doing things, my old way of being, the big part of which seemed to be patience. I was patient with this and patient with that. Patient with Virginia, patient with my parents, patient with the farm. Patient with Nixon, patient with the pulp mill, patient, patient, patient.

I figured I had taken patience about as far as it could go and it didn’t seem to be working. Nothing good seemed to come out of it. It seemed the more patient I was, the more I had to be patient with.

Sometime in the next few days I gave up food.

“Are you sure you’re not hungry, Mark? You haven’t eaten anything for the last three days.” Kathy.

I remember trying to eat some bread to make her feel better. I really wasn’t hungry. The bread had a sharply bitter taste. The texture was awful, sticking to the top of my mouth, almost suffocating me, sticking to my teeth and gums and making my whole mouth burn and itch. It made awful squishy sounds. I had to spit it out.

At the urging of others I made a few more attempts at food between then and the hospital, but it never went much better.

It had now been about a week of Mark acting more and more strangely since the magic of our joint Eden. Simon, Kathy, and Jack were getting more and more alarmed, but there wasn’t much they could do except talk to me a lot and hope things worked out.

Zeke was more and more my closest companion. No matter how screwy and frustrating things were getting with people, Zeke was always there, always loving, always utterly understanding. He seemed to know that something was up and stuck closely by me, giving up his usual solitary jaunts. He was my guardian angel. His unfathomable wisdom, compassion, and protectiveness were slightly spooky, but they made me feel not half so alone or scared. The third floor, where we usually slept, was accessible only by ladder, which made it impossible for Zeke to get there. I moved my foam pad and sleeping bag down into the little library-sewing room off the kitchen so that I could always be with him. Even though I couldn’t sleep, I lay down from time to time to get a little rest and slow things down a bit.

What to do while the others slept? I had read
War and Peace
and
Anna Karenina
a couple of weeks earlier and had started through Jack London. I had finished
The Call of the Wild
and a collection of short stories and was working on
The Sea Wolf
. About halfway through, the whole thing started getting too real. It was dualistic, good vs. evil, and the evil was just too real and the descriptions too moving and…and it had to be more than just a book. The pages and words would twist and blur in the really gruesome spots. I had to stop and catch my breath
after every two or three pages. The closer I got to the end the worse it became. I was convinced that I really shouldn’t finish the book, that if I did I would die or the world would end or worse.

Since reading was out, I got my old Olivetti and started banging out letters to old friends, to Virginia, to various members of the family. I was trying to clue them in about all the wonderful things that had been happening to me and all the wonderful new truths I had found. Unfortunately, the typewriter bit didn’t work too well. I had trouble hitting the right letters and even more trouble seeing what was wrong about the wrong letters I had hit. One key was as good as the next. While there was a lot of truth to that, I felt it was only fair to the people who weren’t quite where I was yet to make an effort to make myself as intelligible as possible. I switched over to longhand. I still had some of the same problems but to a lesser extent.

Seventeen pages to Pa, twenty-one to Ma, twenty-five to sister Edie, twenty-four to sister Nan, sixteen to an old professor, and so on. I was writing like the wind. The words just came like magic and they were all just right.

As far as talking with the people who were really there, I kept coming back to my old question. “Is there a struggle going on?”

“Is there a what?”

“Is there a struggle going on? I’m not really quite sure what I mean by that. I’m just sort of curious as to what you might feel about it.”

“I think I know what you mean but I don’t know. It’s hard to say.”

“Oh, well,” said I and tried to get away from the sticky unpleasantness in the pit of my stomach and back to the sheer beauty and glee of it all. But the question haunted me.

 

IS THERE A STRUGGLE GOING ON? Why on earth would there be a struggle going on? Struggle means some sort of pain. What sort of sense can there be in pain?

“Do you remember the other day when I asked if there was a struggle going on?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, I’ve been thinking about it some and I think there probably is a struggle going on.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, I’m not exactly sure. It’s just something I feel within myself.”

“That there’s a struggle going on?”

“Yeah. And I think that maybe like it’s important. That it explains a lot of things, that it’s going on inside everyone and that maybe it’s real important to figure out how to get where we really want to be. How to get enlightenment, liberation, salvation, whatever you want to call it.”

“This struggle, is it in you or the outside world?”

“Both. There is no outside and inside. It’s all one. Where do I end and you begin? What’s outside and what’s inside? We’re all one. The struggle makes up everything. The struggle is between two opposites, good and evil, positive and negative, yes and no, whatever you want to call it. On and off. Everything is made up of an infinite number of ons and offs. Like computer language, where any piece of information is stored as a series of ons and offs.”

Simon and I got into a discussion of enlightenment. The talk was going pretty good. There seemed to be an awful lot of yeses going around. And then he said something that struck me very strangely.

“You know, stuff like this is really great. I really think there’s something here. I really think I might be ready to go somewhere to find a teacher to help me get further. You know, a guru or something?”

I felt betrayed. “Go some place? A teacher? A guru or something? Why? It’s all right here. What more do you need? You want a guru? Shit, right here you have the woods, the land, the goats, the birds, Zeke, Jack, Kathy, myself, and God knows how many other incredible
teachers, right here. You want guru, shit. I’ll be your guru and you can be mine. What do you want to know?”

“I don’t know. I just have the feeling that there are higher beings, people who really know about this stuff who could help me out.”

“I don’t know, Simon. There’s something about the way you say ‘guru’ that brings me down. I guess I’m just reminded of priests, professors, psychiatrists, etc., and professional poets and musicians even. I just keep hoping that we can find a way to do all those things ourselves. You know, ‘get it in the streets’ type thing. If you’re really dense you might need signs to point things out to you and a real official-type guru, but I think a big part of getting there is just realizing that everything you need is right where you are.”

 

“Simon, what do you know about hypnosis?”

“I don’t know. Not too much, I suppose. Why?”

“Well, it’s something I’ve thought about some before and have just been thinking about more now for the past few days. I think that very possibly it’s a big clue. I’m operating under the assumption that I’m pretty much like other people and that everything I go through, other people go through the same thing to some extent and vice versa. It seems to be the only sensible way to look at things but I guess it could turn out to be a horrible mistake. If I’m sinking I don’t want to drag you along with me, Simon. That’s one of the things I’m afraid of now, that I’m sinking and am going to drag you and others down into the pit with me. Am I making sense? I think this is all somehow tied up with hypnosis and that I’m explaining it the best way it can be explained. Did I ever show you a book I started writing a couple of years back? It was all about stuff like this. It was sort of a manual about how to operate with a blown mind. Well, anyway, what I’m trying to say is that if your mind is in the right space of openness and awareness you can listen to what I’m saying and get a lot out of it,
whereas some deadhead would listen and think I was crazy. I think maybe that’s what a lot of craziness is. People just not being creative enough listeners.

“ ‘Is the tea in the tongue or in the leaves?’ That’s a phrase that’s been popping up into my mind about every fifteen minutes day and night for the last week or so. Maybe some part of me is trying to hypnotize me with it. Sometimes I think I’m being hypnotized by compost. I guess it’s all pretty funny. Really, isn’t it?

“One of the things I might be doing now or want to do in some ways is to ask you beg you to hypnotize me. I guess I’m afraid of losing control somehow and running amuck and so if you could hypnotize me then you could control me and everything would be all right. It seems ridiculous to worry about losing control. I have no idea about what losing control would look like. I’ve never really thought of myself as being in control. The whole idea of being in control seems silly to me, hysterically funny in fact, but nonetheless I think I’m afraid of losing control. So if you could somehow hypnotize me, I’d be much obliged. I don’t want you to worry. I’m pretty sure everything will be all right. I can’t imagine what really bad could happen.”

Most of the time I was talking Simon just smiled and nodded and said something like “It’s all right, Mark. Yeah, everything will be fine.”

“Simon, I feel like something really new is happening. Like I feel more open toward you than I’ve ever felt with anyone else. I guess I’ve just broken through something and have come to some sort of realization about brotherhood and communication or something. It’s fantastically wonderful. I’m really overwhelmed. I’ve really got nothing to hide. Ask me anything. This is what the revolution, yoga, religion, meditation, etc., is all about. We’re reaching for paradise. Hot shit. I had a feeling we’d get somewhere some day and now I feel we’re really on our way.”

MY GLASS SLIPPER. There were times I was scared, shaking, convulsing in excruciating pain and bottomless despair. But I was never clumsy.

Most people assume it must be very painful for me to remember being crazy. It’s not true. The fact is, my memories of being crazy give me an almost sensual glee. The crazier I was, the more fun remembering it is.

I don’t want to go nuts again, I’d do anything to avoid it. Part of the pleasure I derive from my memories comes from how much I appreciate being sane now, but most of what’s so much fun with my memories is that when I was crazy I found my glass slipper. Everything I did, felt, and said had an awesome grace, symmetry, and perfection to it. My appreciation of that grace, symmetry, and perfection hasn’t vanished with the insanity itself.

It’s regrets that make painful memories. When I was crazy I did everything just right.

There were “problems” but somehow they didn’t seem like problems at the time. Tasks that required only minimal concentration—cutting wood, building fires, pruning trees, fetching water—became progressively more difficult and then impossible, but that seemed too silly to worry about. Even if I managed by herculean effort to think something was worth doing, I couldn’t keep my mind on it. There was so much else going on.

I felt no lack of energy, in fact I had a supersurplus; but my hands, arms, and legs were getting all confused. I’d get all hung up in how perfectly beautiful one muscle was, exactly what it did, and get it to do it just right. But then all the others would go off on their own little trip. I nicked my ankle with the chain saw. I was losing my coordination as well as my concentration.

Ambivalence and disability. It was like something in me knew I would become unable to function, and got me ready by telling me ahead of time that it didn’t matter.

I worried about not being able to go anywhere. Any unpleasantness, any threat, and I would collapse. The idea of cops horrified me. The idea of anyone but people who loved me utterly was terrifying. I was stuck at the farm forever. And soon that wouldn’t be good enough.

I worried about not being able to communicate with people. They wouldn’t understand. Yet so much of what I was going through seemed so right, so valuable, so much fun.

 

“Simon, I keep getting these awful rushes of fear, waves of total terror that leave me shaking and weak. I keep trying to figure out what the hell it is I’m afraid of. Last night I thought my heart was going to stop again. Now I’m keeping you up because I’m afraid to go to bed. It makes no sense. There was a big thing about fear in
Dune
. There was sort of a chant that went, ‘Fear is the mind killer. Let the fear run through you…’ I’ve been trying to do that but I don’t think it’s working. I don’t know if I’m going to be able to beat this bitch.